Peace and Justice Studies

Despite the field of peacebuilding's normative commitments to reducing violence, preliminary encounters between the field and decolonial theory reveal how peacebuilding theory and practice can reproduce specific racialized, gendered, and territorialized exclusions through its Eurocentric constructions of expert knowledge. Because of its inability to engage equitably with diverse ways of knowing and being, the field continues to participate in forms of epistemic and ontological violence linked to the dynamics of global coloniality. This essay introduces the decolonial concept of pluriversality as a critical and constructive resource through which to advance the encounter between the field of peacebuilding and decolonial thought, as the irreducible plurality of the concept of peace itself impels scholars and practitioners of peacebuilding to acknowledge and protect diverse ways of knowing and being in the world that risk erasure under hegemonic peace discourses.

Liberal democracies often include rights of participation, guarantees of protection, and policies that privilege model citizens within a bounded territory. Notwithstanding claims of universal equality for “humanity,” they achieve these goals by epistemically elevating certain traits of identity above “others,” sustaining colonial biases that continue to favor whoever is regarded more “human.” The COVID-19 pandemic has exacerbated these fault lines, unveiling once more the often-hidden prevalence of inequalities that are based on race, gender, class, ethnicity, and other axes of power and their overlaps. Decolonial theories and practices analyze these othering tendencies and inequalities while also highlighting how sites of suffering sometimes become locations of solidarity and agency, which uncover often-erased alternatives and lessons.

The field of international peacebuilding increasingly recognizes that violence is not a unitary phenomenon, but an array of constraints on human flourishing spanning physical, structural, cultural, and symbolic registers (Galtung 1969; 1990; Jabri 1996; O. Richmond 2012; 2016). This recognition provides corollary insights that building peace requires, at the very least, the reduction of violence in its complex and interlocking forms. But despite a normative commitment to reducing diverse forms of violence, the field of international peacebuilding has struggled to address the potentials for epistemic and ontological violence following from the inherent Eurocentrism of its own disciplinary origins and orientations (Walker 2004; Jabri 2013; Sabaratnam 2013; Goetze 2016). As a result of its exclusion of ways of knowing and being not authorized by Western academic discourses, the theory and practice of international peacebuilding frequently presumes the universalizability of Eurocentric ...

The 2008 financial crisis exposed and exacerbated significant disaffection with Western liberal democratic institutions, especially around their apparent inability to check the injustices of an increasingly globalized neoliberal economic order. The election of Donald Trump was arguably both an accelerant for and among the most significant global consequences of the "populist moment" generated by this democratic discontent. The Trump presidency, therefore, offers key insights into both the risks that this populist moment poses for liberal-democratic political orders, given the rise of illiberal anti-democratic forms of Right-wing populism-but also the opportunities to imagine and enact visions of more just and inclusive democratic politics capable of surviving the present political conjuncture.

The local turn in Peace Studies has raised important practical and normative  questions  around  the ‘liberal  peace’ approach  that defines  post-Cold  War  international  peacebuilding.  However, recent  critical  interventions  reveal  the  limits  of  the  local  turn’s engagement  with  themes  including  race,  gender,  class,  and colonialism.  Engaging  Indigenous  authors  who  ground  diverse conceptualizations of peace in the restitution of Indigenous land, the  following  discussion  shows  how  the  local  turn’s  theoretical framing  of  indigeneity  risks  erasing  decolonial  accounts  of Indigenous peacebuilding  in  settler-colonial  societies through  its conceptual  reliance  on  international  intervention  and  normative prioritization of hybrid peace outcomes.

This entry explores how a pluriversal approach to peace could reflect both the ontological and ethical aspects of pluriversality. On the one hand, the recurrence of diverse notions of 'peace' across various situated ways of knowing and being helps to disclose the pluriverse in all its complexity and interconnections. The exploration of the similarities and incommensurable differences between these pluriversal notions of 'peace' might in turn offer insights into the practice of pluriversal politics and attendant possibilities for engagement and solidarities to promote peace within and across the various lifeworlds that constitute the pluriverse. Taken together, the ontological and ethical valences of pluriversal peacebuilding offer important conceptual and ethical tools for promoting visions of peace beyond the direct, epistemic, and ontological violence of a Eurocentered modernity.

The bicentennial of the publication of Mary Shelley's Frankenstein has brought renewed scholarly interest in the novel's historical influence and contemporary applications. Recent thematic engagements mine Shelley's iconic novel for ethico-political insights around challenges of modernity as diverse as environmental degradation, post-/transhumanism, various aspects of gender construction (including themes of androgyny and toxic masculinity), nuclear security and terrorism, globalization and the influence of international corporations, children's rights, and--as the "governing myth of modern biology" a cavalcade of concerns around bioethics and advances in medical technology. Of these many diverse engagements with Frankenstein, perhaps none remain as contested as the novel's reception in discussions of colonialism, with Shelley's masterwork alternately hailed as both challenging and upholding contemporaneous (and subsequent) colonialist discourses. Rather than attempt to settle these interpretive disputes about the novel's own (post)colonial content, in this chapter I situate Mary Shelley's Frankenstein and its mobilization in political and academic discourses within broader legacies of Eurocentric exclusion of non-Western knowledges captured for decolonial theorists by the concept of modernity/coloniality. Drawing parallels between racialized readings of Shelley's iconic Creature and decolonial theorist Santiago Slabodsky's critical reading of Emmanuel Levinas, I outline the ethico-political and epistemic limitations that necessarily inhere in efforts to access colonial alterity--or seek insights about modernity more generally--from within the European imaginary.